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This book argues that democracies are increasingly unable to communicate, implement and evaluate the enormous amount of public policies they create. It is relevant to all political scientists as well as readers outside of academia who seek to understand the complexities of modern policy making.

The book assesses the policy actions of select Asian governments (China, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand) to address critical health system functions from a policy design perspective. The findings show that all governments in the region have made tremendous strides in focussing their attention on the core issues and, especially, the interactions among them. However, there is still insufficient appreciation of the usefulness of public hospitals and their efficient management. Similarly, some governments have not made sufficient efforts to establish an effective regulatory framework which is especially vital in systems with a large share of private providers and payers. A well-run public hospital system and an effective framework for regulating private providers are essential tools to support the governance, financing, and payment reforms underway in the six health systems studied in this book.

We need new governance solutions to help us improve public policies and services, solve complex societal problems, strengthen social communities and reinvigorate democracy. By changing how government engages with citizens and stakeholders, co-creation provides an attractive and feasible approach to governance that goes beyond the triptych of public bureaucracy, private markets and self-organized communities. Inspired by the successful use of co-creation for product and service design, this book outlines a broad vision of co-creation as a strategy of public governance. Through the construction of platforms and arenas to facilitate co-creation, this strategy can empower local communities, enhance broad-based participation, mobilize societal resources and spur public innovation while building ownership for bold solutions to pressing problems and challenges. The book details how to use co-creation to achieve goals. This exciting and innovative study combines theoretical argument with illustrative empirical examples, visionary thinking and practical recommendations.

For several decades, higher education systems have undergone continuous waves of reform, driven by a combination of concerns about the changing labour needs of the economy, competition within the global-knowledge economy, and nationally competitive positioning strategies to enhance the performance of higher education systems. Yet, despite far-ranging international pressures, including the emergence of an international higher education market, enormous growth in cross-border student mobility, and pressures to achieve universities of world class standing, boost research productivity and impact, and compete in global league tables, the suites of policy, policy designs and sector outcomes continue to be marked as much by hybridity as they are of similarity or convergence. This volume explores these complex governance outcomes from a theoretical and empirical comparative perspective, addressing those vectors precipitating change in the modalities and instruments of governance, and how they interface at the systemic and institutional levels, and across geographic regions.

Hyper-active governance is a new way of thinking about governing that gets beyond simplistic debates about whether the state is more or less powerful. It focuses on tensions between the need for expertise and its inherent contestability. The book develops a new typology of governing approaches, using innovative social theory.

This volume offers a comprehensive set of approaches to understanding the changing dimensions of higher education governance, the structural, institutional, and regional-national drivers precipitating convergence and divergence in governance approaches, and maps the directions of change, their consequences and outcomes.

Many Western countries have seen an increase in the volume and importance of external consultants in the public policy process. This book investigates and compares the use of these consultants and explores the implications for the nature of the state and for democratically legitimized and accountable decision-making.

This book analyses how policies to prevent diseases are related to policies aiming to cure illnesses by conducting a comparative historical analysis of Australia, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. It also demonstrates how the politicization of the medical profession contributes to the success of preventive health policy.

Shows that the administrative bodies of international organizations can develop informal working routines that allow them to exert influence beyond their formal autonomy. It is relevant to all political scientists as well as broader audiences interested in the dynamics of global policy making and the role of public administrations therein.

This book presents a cutting-edge analysis of state-society transformation in Asia under globalisation. It includes an important set of sector and country-based case study chapters that look at processes of marketisation in countries including China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

A comprehensive investigation of shale gas policies in Eastern Europe, a region highly dependent on Russian gas imports. Appealing to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of comparative public policy, regulatory politics, energy and environmental policy and European studies, as well as policymakers working in the energy sector.

This book presents a cutting-edge analysis of state-society transformation in Asia under globalisation. It includes an important set of sector and country-based case study chapters that look at processes of marketisation in countries including China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The work of early pluralist thinkers, from Arthur Bentley to Robert Dahl, inspired much optimism about democracy. They argued that democracy was functioning well, despite disagreements arising among the diversity of interests represented in policy-making processes. Yet it is unlikely that anyone paying attention to news coverage today would share such optimism. The media portray current policy-making processes as intractably polarized, devoid of any opportunity to move forward and adopt essential policy changes. This book aims to revive our long-lost sense of optimism about policy-making and democracy. Through original research into biotechnology policy-making in North America and Europe, Eric Montpetit shows that the depiction of policy-making offered by early pluralist thinkers is not so far off the present reality. Today's policy decision-making process - complete with disagreement among the participants - is consistent with what might be expected in a pluralist society, in sharp contrast with the negative image projected by the media.